Nativism is central to the modern far right, and it’s ideology holds that race, gender, and other inequalities are natural and even positive (Mudde 2007, 2019).

Contact theory research has demonstrated that such prejudicial views toward out-groups can be reduced though interaction (Pettigrew et al. 2011).

Certain forms of urban design promote more contact between neighbors that others (Jacobs 1961, Gehl 2011).

Implication: in some cities there should be more interaction, less prejudice, and less support for the far right.

We are now in the fourth wave of the rise of the far right in Europe (Mudde 2019).

At the individual level, research explaining this rise has focused on economic and cultural grievance hypotheses, with mixed results (Golder 2016).

These same hypotheses have been applied to the social context, operationalized as unemployment rates and migrant populations (e.g. Georgiadou et al. 2018).

Most of the literature stays within this competition framework, though there are interesting exceptions (e.g. Bolet 2021).

There is a very large literature that direct contact reduces prejudice (Pettigrew et al. 2011).

However, newer literature on extended contact is particularly interesting (Zhou et al. 2018).

People whose friends have out-group friends are less likely to be prejudiced.

People who observe, but don’t participate in, intergroup contact are also less likely to be prejudiced.

At the scale of a city, the potential impact is enormous.

Modernist design trends inserted openness into previously continuous urban fabric throughout the 20th century.

Two dueling philosophies argued that cities should expand horizontally (urban sprawl) or vertically (set-back residential high-rises). For both, grass and light was essential.

Jacobs (1961) famously sounded the alarm that these trends were degrading the vitality of cities, reducing interaction between neighbors.

EEA’s CORINE Land Cover data distinguishes between continuous urban fabric and discontinuous urban fabric which broadly captures the dichotomy between compact, traditional designs and modernist, open ones.

H1: Residents of cities with more continuous urban fabric will be less likely to have sympathy for far-right parties.

H2: The negative relationship between continuous urban fabric and far-right sympathy will be stronger in cities with larger relative migrant populations.

I study a single country, to reduce variation in political context and maximize data availability and consistency.

Vox is very similar to other radical-right parties in Europe, especially in its anti-immigrant and anti-feminism stances (Gould 2019, Arcila Calderón et al. 2020, Bernardez-Rodal et al. 2020).

At the individual level, data comes from 12 pooled CIS barometer surveys from January 2019 to March 2020, which ask respondents how likely they are to support Vox on a 0 (never) to 10 (always) scale. The dichotomous outcome variable treats response 1-10 as sympathy for the far right.

City-level data is provided by Eurostat.

Hypotheses are tested using Bayesian multilevel logistic regression models fitted with rstanarm.

Models include urban fabric, population, and density, as well as variables common to the literature: unemployment rate, migrant population, and change in migrant population. All city-level variables are coded as one-standard-deviation z-scores.

At the individual level, I include age, age², gender, religion, education, and occupation variables. I model separate intercepts for all categorical variables.

I also account for variation in the political context by including survey date as a continuous variable and CCAA as a level.

The explanatory literature on far-right support should shift its focus from the economic grievance vs. cultural grievance debate. As this paper and Bolet (2021) show, there is much more to the social context.

We may focus too much on immigration issues, as well. The far right seeks to perpetuate many other inequalities, especially gender.

Social scientists should give more consideration to urban fabric. Climate change will force us to redesign our cities again, and we need to be part of the conversation.